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Conversion back to a more manageable signal is much easier by taking the 3rd row from the top instead of the 4th, as then there are 27 gliders instead of 19, and a 27-to-1 reduction can be achieved by stringing together three x3 multipliers. Seeing the 19-to-1 might be a bit more interesting though.

Sphenocorona wrote:Conversion back to a more manageable signal is much easier by taking the 3rd row from the top instead of the 4th, as then there are 27 gliders instead of 19, and a 27-to-1 reduction can be achieved by stringing together three x3 multipliers. Seeing the 19-to-1 might be a bit more interesting though.

Not a lot more interesting, really -- it's just two x3s and an x2, plus the glider-to-block converter to knock the first glider off the series. Makes the circuit a little slower to recover, but we're not exactly worrying about that kind of thing around here.

I had a hard time getting the raw RLE out of that LifeWiki page, though -- it's actually a macrocell file and not RLE, so any line starting with asterisks got mangled into a shorter line behind some number of bullet points. Here's the usual .mc.gz attached to the forum message.

Attachments really don't seem too terribly cumbersome. If you want to standardize to a single location, you could also just add the latest and hugest pattern as an attachment to the first post in the thread, whenever there's a worthy update.

A 19-glider-to-Herschel could be made quite a bit smaller, by choosing a tighter set of x2 and x3 components, maybe a 3H-to-G plus a syringe sometimes. This one is a straight chain starting from the L156-based period doubler, so the output glider has a long way to travel back to block (pun intended) the input lane.

-- Well, "long" is a relative term -- compared to how far the loafers had to travel, it's pretty minuscule.

I really like the way the loafers are so much slower than the gliders that they get converted into...!

dvgrn wrote:In fact, it's not really any [period], due to an error I made in blocking off unused edge-shooter outputs. I used blocks, but I'm going to have to patch that with beehives instead, and remove the blocks.

muzik wrote:EDIT: 154560 doesn't work either, what the hell? I also tested it yesterday, and 38640 didn't work either...

Did you see my admission of guilt, above? Try the latest patched version, with the 19G-to-H converter. Even 19320 or 38640 work fine, as long as you don't mind the message being a little hard to read due to the bit-shifting.

This might still be slightly annoying, but with a collaborative pattern of this size, it's easier to maintain it on the wiki than to keep posting new versions that will go out of date as soon as the next post makes another addition.

Now that the maximum size of a post has been bumped up, the pattern will actually fit in a message again, even in RLE format -- but not if one of Goldtiger997's big recent converters gets added next.

I was even thinking of offering a prize to everyone who definitively finishes it, however, I do not believe it is possible.

but who knows - there may be those for whom it would be "no big deal"...

It certainly seems possible to finish this, depending on what you mean by "definitively finish". Is it okay to just connect the output of the pattern back to the input, with the correct timing (may have to expand or preferably shrink the rest of the structure a bit)?

There's an initial section of self-destructing Demonoid circuitry. I hope we can ignore that for the second and later cycles of the racetrack? And just replace the one-time turner made out of two blocks with a Snark, to make the remainder of the track repeatable?

I was even thinking of offering a prize to everyone who definitively finishes it, however, I do not believe it is possible.

but who knows - there may be those for whom it would be "no big deal"...

It certainly seems possible to finish this, depending on what you mean by "definitively finish". Is it okay to just connect the output of the pattern back to the input, with the correct timing (may have to expand or preferably shrink the rest of the structure a bit)?

There's an initial section of self-destructing Demonoid circuitry. I hope we can ignore that for the second and later cycles of the racetrack? And just replace the one-time turner made out of two blocks with a Snark, to make the remainder of the track repeatable?

of course your suggestion would complete it as a "real" racetrack !

originally was trying to make a "conduit-converter stamp collection" just under the "life is awesome" loafer-ticker-banner

but I put the crab second and he went off on a wild tangent north-by-northwest far off into left field

I was thinking of the user experience in browser by typical web surfer and wanted to save them time

so as not to lose them but instead build interest

got the cheap-and-dirty-fix up online so I at least have a "placeholder" there;

will have to go back and try to build a better mousetrap when I have time...

In the Game of Life there are no winners there are no losers there are only SURVIVORS.
.....**
...****
.******
*( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)*

then use our fantastic Life Viewer to make the most splendid 50th Anniversary demo video...

This certainly seems like a worthwhile Conway's Life Quinquagenary goal. It's been a discussion topic off and on for quite a while, and is currently #3 on my to-do list, but unfortunately the other two items are fairly time-consuming.

I'm thinking of it as a LifeViewer pattern near the standard limit of size, say 8000x8000. Seems like if we went up to 16000^2 LifeViewer probably wouldn't be able to run it as well, given how much stuff will be in it. So this Infinite Conduit-based racetrack would have to be packed in a lot tighter.

Stationary Stuff in the Center
In the middle of my hypothetical Life-Action Exploratorium, there would be lots of interesting-looking oscillators, Herschel mechanisms, etc. If you zoom in on any of them, a pop-up label should show up giving author and discovery date. (And maybe if you zoom in farther, you might get similar labels for the components that make up each of the larger structures.)

To do this, I think I mostly just have to write a script to extract all the patterns from the LifeWiki that have good labels, and plop them into a big RLE file. Then maybe another script is needed to allow each pattern to be moved around independently from the others, keeping track of label position so that a LifeViewer script can be written out after all the pieces are packed together as well as possible.

A Tighter-Packed Racetrack
Around the edges of the oscillator stamp collection we can run a signal conduit that converts from glider to *WSS to crab to loafer to Cordership to copperhead to... I don't know, tandem glider in a Herschel transceiver? Or maybe a B29? ... and back to a glider again.

And in the unused corners maybe we can run a procession of spaceships, using LifeViewer's PASTE function to add them at the edges and remove them again before they crash into another edge. Just have to arrange it so the whole thing can be LOOPed at a multiple of the period of the stamp collection, which should probably also be the period of the signal conduit.

Method Behind the Madness
The idea is to end up with a LifeViewer-explorable pattern where anyone can just pan and zoom around and look at whatever they want to, and there will be something new to see everywhere they look. Seems like this would be a huge improvement over the usual LifeViewer waypoint script, where you're mostly stuck following the camera around on a fixed pre-scripted path, without any freedom to explore. Waypoint-script guided tours are nice sometimes, but really they almost might as well just be YouTube videos.

If anyone wants to start a collaborative thread for constructing a Life-Action Exploratorium along these lines, I'll certainly try to find time to start contributing to it.

I was even thinking of offering a prize to everyone who definitively finishes it, however, I do not believe it is possible.

but who knows - there may be those for whom it would be "no big deal"...

It certainly seems possible to finish this, depending on what you mean by "definitively finish". Is it okay to just connect the output of the pattern back to the input, with the correct timing (may have to expand or preferably shrink the rest of the structure a bit)?

There's an initial section of self-destructing Demonoid circuitry. I hope we can ignore that for the second and later cycles of the racetrack? And just replace the one-time turner made out of two blocks with a Snark, to make the remainder of the track repeatable?

your confidence inspired me to re-scrutinize...

"almost-a-racetrack" appears to have 22-23 signals

signal appears to be retarded 400 ticks plus or minus N -

so need to slightly advance or massively retard the inbound signal

since the latter would leave us with NO signal after about 23 iterations

slightly advancing the returning pulse is most desirable -

I just do not know how to do that. I have been hunting down various "mystic fireclouds"

on these Forums ( which deserve to have a thread of their own, or maybe even their own website - think of it :

"Mystic FireClouds in the Game of Life" - and a new viral keyword is created... )